The Fascism of Benjamin Netanyahu
Photograph Source: Chatham House – CC BY 2.0
Why has Bibi Netanyahu become the darling and idol of racist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi right-wing scum in Europe and around the world? The answer is not difficult: these scum recognize themselves in him because they consider, quite rightly, that Bibi Netanyahu is flesh of their flesh. And not just because of his warlike and other “exploits”, which have made Netanyahu’s Israel the model state of their dreams (and our nightmares). If all these people celebrate him and identify with him, it’s also because Netanyahu is a pure-blooded fascist by virtue of his origins, his training and his mentors…
In short, the heavyweights of the emerging Brown International, the American Trump, the Russian Putin and the Indian Modi, the Latin Americans Milei and Bolsonaro and the racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, misogynist, fascist and neo-Nazi (and often…anti-Semitic! ) leaders of major far-right parties, some of which govern or are preparing to govern EU member states such as Holland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium or Hungary, understand very well what our (neo)liberal politicians pretend not to: that Netanyahu doesn’t associate with them for opportunistic or tactical reasons, but because the attraction is mutual. Because he recognizes himself in them, in their ideology and in their predilection for physical violence!
And here’s what it’s all about: Bibi Netanyahu was propelled into politics by Yitzhak Shamir, especially when the latter was Prime Minister of Israel (1986-1992) and leader of the Likud, the far-right party in government. The electoral affinity between the two men was evident right from the start, when Shamir made the young Netanyahu, who was already Israeli ambassador to the United Nations (1984), his deputy foreign minister, before handing over the Likud presidency to him in 1993, just three years before Netanyahu became the youngest prime minister in Israel’s history at the age of 47! So it’s no coincidence that Netanyahu has always recognized Yitzhak Shamir not only as his “protector” but also as his ideological mentor..Since Netanyahu has always claimed to be a follower of Shamir’s ideology, even posing as Shamir’s successor and political heir, the question that naturally arises is what was the ideology that Yitzhak Shamir served throughout his life, without ever renouncing anything? One could say that it all began when the young Shamir took over the leadership of the paramilitary Zionist terrorist organization Lehi, after the execution of its founder and leader Avraham Stern by the British police in 1942. Wikipedia’s opening paragraphs on Lehi read:
+ “Under Avraham Stern’s leadership, Lehi was clearly an extreme right-wing group, whose members (though not all) were largely influenced by Italian fascism. Stern’s original political influence was with the Birionim, a group of fascist sympathizers operating on the bangs of the right-wing Zionist Revisionist Party in the early 1930s.”
+ “In November 1940, the fledgling organization published its theses in the form of 18 “Principles of Rebirth (Ikarei ha’Tehiya)”. In particular, they state that:
+ “The borders of a Jewish state must extend from the Nile to the Euphrates (from Egypt to Iraq). This land will be “conquered from foreigners by the sword”. The claim to a state over a large part of the Middle East is made with reference to the Bible (Genesis 15-18). In practice, however, Lehi’s claim would later focus on Palestine and Transjordan (present-day Jordan).
+ “The “Third Kingdom of Israel” would be re-established there (this phrase would be modified in february 1941 ).
+ “Jewish exiles would gather in the new state.
+ “The Temple of Jersalem will be rebuilt (the Stern was mainly composed of lay people. The temple is more a national symbol than a religious one. + The majority of Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) are hostile to such reconstruction, considering it to be the Messiah’s prerogative).
+ “The Arab population must leave the new state: “the problem of foreigners will be solved by an exchange of population”.
In another of its texts, Lehi states that the world is divided “into fighting and dominating races on the one hand, and weak and degenerate races on the other”. The Hebrews must recover their ‘warrior and colonizer’ virtues of antiquity”.
It’s true that after Stern’s death, Lehi split into several fractions with quite different agendas and ideologies. However, they all agreed on one issue: terrorism as a (preferred) means of action. That’s why all Lehi leaders, and of course Yitzhak Shamir, always advocated large-scale terrorist operations (of which Shamir was the leader), in which their organization was the protagonist, either alone or together with the Irgun. And all this, both in Palestine and abroad (London), resulting in several thousand deaths among the British, Arabs and even Jews. It should be noted that two of the most infamous terrorist actions, the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and the assassination of the UN “mediator for Palestine” Count Bernadotte, were conceived and executed by Lehi leaders and militants…
Having said this about Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascist, racist and terrorist ideological origins, what about his current association with neo-Nazis, fascists and other overt anti-Semites? How can we explain the paradox of a Prime Minister of the State of Israel who not only consorts with such people, but -even worst- considers and celebrates them as privileged allies of the Jews in their fight against …anti-Semites? No paradox, would reply Lehi leaders Yitzhak Shamir and Abraham Stern, but also their mentor to all, the founder of far-right “revisionist” Zionism Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and even… Bibi Netanyahu’s own father. But why? Well, because what unites all these historic figures of right-wing Zionism is that they had no problem with the conscience of proposing and sometimes concluding alliances with… Hitler and Mussolini themselves!
As we wrote in our article When Einstein called “fascists” those who rule Israel for the last 44 years… “do we have to consider then as surprising and “abnormal” these “strategical alliances” and the flirting of Netanyahu and his friends with the international riff-raff of sworn anti-communists and racists, who “by chance” are also sworn anti-semites? Not at all. Their first teacher was none other than the father and theorist of Zionist Revisionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Motivated by his pathological hatred of the Russian Revolution, Jabotinsky even allied himself in 1922 with the Ukranian anti-communist and nationalist war-lord Symon Petliura, whose army carried out between 1917 and 1922… 897 anti-Jewish progroms, in which at least 30,000 Ukrainian Jews were massacred!”. And we went on to point out that “Bibi’s father, who served as Jabotinsky’s secretary, followed Abba Ahimeir when the latter came into conflict with Jabotinsky, who rejected his proposal to become a… Jewish Mussolini at the head of a clearly fascist Zionist party. A close collaborator of this ideologue and fascist theorist, Bibi’s father edited the publications of Ahimeir’s organization, which forged fairly close ties with Mussolini’s fascist Italy, but never achieved the same with Nazi Germany, although he did not hesitate to praise Hitler in 1933!”.
But it gets worse with Netanyahu’s mentor and his terrorist organization, for Lehi founder and leader Avraham Stern had no hesitation, in the middle of the World War, in sending a letter to Hitler via the Third Reich’s embassy in Beirut, proposing an alliance in due form, despite being aware of the Nazi regime’s persecution of the Jews! It’s exactly this cynicism and total lack of scruples that characterize Jabotinsky, Ahimeir, Begin and Shamir – in other words, all Netanyahu’s forerunners and masters of thought – that we find today in the alliances Netanyahu is forging with the crème de la crème of the far right and global fascism, who couldn’t care less whether his arch-reactionary and obscurantist allies are anti-Semites and epigones or nostalgists of the pogromists and other genocidaires of the Jews of yesteryear!
So what can we say about those who pretend to be astonished at Netanyahu’s “lack of a project” or who don’t understand why he, a Jew, allies himself with fascists and anti-Semites? They are nothing but unrepentant hypocrites, for Netanyahu does have a project, which he is scrupulously implementing: in Palestine, where he is exterminating and expelling Palestinians, and in the Middle East, where he is building the Greater Israel of his messianic dreams. As for his privileged alliances with the racist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi scum of the extreme right, there’s nothing incomprehensible about them, as long as we admit the obvious: the fact that Netanyahu is a pure-blooded fascist who, moreover, is in the process of becoming one of the pillars of this Brown International in the making, which already constitutes the greatest threat currently facing the whole of humanity!…
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